The Hammer Museum will not be your common college artwork museum. Whereas nonetheless affiliated with the College of California, Los Angeles (UCLA),it has advisory boards stacked with main collectors and artists. It’s positioned off campus. And over the previous 25 years, director Ann Philbin has reworked it from an oil tycoon’s dusty vainness museum right into a dynamic vacation spot for modern artwork.
However campus life got here to the museum this Saturday (4 Might), the night time of the Hammer’s annual Gala within the Backyard, within the type of a college protest exterior the constructing confronting friends as they pulled into the parking storage of their Teslas and Mercedes EQSs. Protestors have been calling for amnesty for UCLA college students arrested in a police sweep of pro-Palestine encampments on campus this week and for the elimination of the college’s chancellor with chants of: “Hey hey, ho ho, Gene Block has acquired to go.”
Block was not truly in attendance on the gala, which was crowded with artists (together with Charles Gaines, Mary Weatherford, Andrea Bowers and Glenn Kaino), museum leaders (Thelma Golden, Michael Govan, Jessica Morgan and Connie Butler) and a few Hollywood figures (Steven Spielberg, Kate Capshaw, Jane Fonda, Keanu Reeves and Owen Wilson) among the many roughly 700 friends. Within the first speech of the night time, Jodie Foster and her spouse, the artist Alexandra Hedison, set the tone by acknowledging the campus protests and significance of free speech earlier than returning to the duty at hand: honouring Hammer director Annie Philbin, who is about to retire in November, for 25 years of management.
And if the protest didn’t make abundantly clear how difficult it may be to steer a museum within the twenty first century, a number of speeches by artists did. Philbin’s long-time good friend Robert Gober mentioned her historical past of Aids activism when she helmed the Drawing Middle in New York, throughout a time of lethal authorities inaction. Lari Pittman, who helped to recruit Philbin to the museum, remembered it earlier than her as “a darkish, moribund and traditionally anachronistic place—additionally a “full fixer higher”, noting that she has given “artists on this neighborhood the continuity of 25 fucking years” in distinction to different establishments on the town with a speedy succession of leaders (a transparent jab on the Museum of Up to date Artwork). Kara Walker, who made her New York debut 30 years in the past on the Drawing Middle beneath Philbin, known as Philbin “a badass motherfucker who doesn’t take no shit from no one”.
Different homages got here from author and sometimes-curator Hilton Als, artist Mark Bradford, Ford Basis president Darren Walker and Will Ferrell, who recognized himself as a “avenue performer”—“stripper!” yelled a heckler, or good friend—in a nutty roast that offered much-needed comedian reduction. “I’ve been sitting at my desk and listening to everybody drone on and on about how nice Annie Philbin is,” he mentioned. “And I’m pondering to myself: are they speaking about the identical monster that I do know?” He took the bit as far, perhaps farther, than it may go.
Philbin’s personal speech briefly addressed “the violent clashes on the campus of UCLA” and reaffirmed the Hammer’s mission as a discussion board for “dialogue round a few of the most fractious and tough topics of our time” earlier than occurring to explain the museum’s work supporting “a whole bunch, perhaps even hundreds, of wonderful artists”. Tearing up greater than as soon as, Philbin ended her speak by thanking the numerous museum administrators in attendance, with a particular call-out to Connie Butler, who left a submit because the Hammer’s chief curator to steer MoMA PS1 in New York. The final nod went to Philbin’s spouse, communications guru Cynthia Wornham, which introduced folks to their ft.
Philbin introduced that the gala cleared $2.5m, the most important internet but. There was no official touch upon the search now underway for the subsequent director, which is being led by the agency Isaacson, Miller, however loads of dinner-table chatter about it. You would hear many variations on the identical theme: it’s exhausting to think about the Hammer with out Annie. The director of the San Jose Museum of Artwork, S. Sayre Batton, made one other level. “What a pleasant job for the subsequent individual,” she mentioned. “Every part’s in good order.”